SUMMARY

Symantec’s Messaging Gateway management console is susceptible to a reflected cross-site scripting (XSS) issue found in one of the administrative interface pages.   Successful exploitation could result in potential session hijacking or unauthorized actions directed against the console with the privileges of the targeted user’s browser.

AFFECTED PRODUCTS

ISSUES

MITIGATION

Details

Symantec was notified of a reflected XSS issue impacting Symantec’s Messaging Gateway 10.x management console. 

A reflected XSS issue exists in one of the interface pages used to manage the gateway as a result of insufficient validation/sanitation of user input.  Successful targeting of this weakness could allow an unauthorized individual to steal the browser cookies or hijack the browser session being used to manage the console.  This could potentially allow the unauthorized individual authorized user-level access to the management console.  The management console normally allows access to only specified users/administrators with varying levels of access depending on their requirements. 

In a typical installation the Symantec Messaging Gateway management interface should not be accessible external to the network environment and access should be restricted to specified users/administrators.  Web browsers used by authorized users to manage Symantec Messaging Gateway should never be used for casual browsing of external web sites during an administrative session.  These restrictions would greatly reduce exposure to external attempts against this type of issue.

A malicious but authorized non-privileged network user or an external attacker would need to successfully entice an authorized management console user to visit a malicious web site or click on a malicious HTML link in an email in any attempts to take advantage of this issue. 

Symantec Response

Symantec engineers verified this issue in Symantec Messaging Gateway 10.x. Symantec strongly recommends Symantec Messaging Gateway customers update to the latest release of Symantec Messaging Gateway, 10.5.2.  Symantec knows of no exploitation of or adverse customer impact from this issue.

Symantec Messaging Gateway 10.5.2 is currently available through customer’s normal update channels.

Best Practices

As part of normal best practices, Symantec strongly recommends:

• Restrict access to administration or management systems to privileged users.
• Disable remote access if not required or restrict it to trusted/authorized systems only.
• Where possible, limit exposure of application and web interfaces to trusted/internal networks only.
• Keep all operating systems and applications updated with the latest vendor patches.
• Follow a multi-layered approach to security. Run both firewall and anti-malware applications, at a minimum, to provide multiple points of detection and protection to both inbound and outbound threats.
• Deploy network and host-based intrusion detection systems to monitor network traffic for signs of anomalous or suspicious activity. This may aid in detection of attacks or malicious activity related to exploitation of latent vulnerabilities

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Symantec credits William Costa, [email protected], for reporting this issue to us and coordinating with us as we resolved it. 

REFERENCES

BID: Security Focus, http://www.securityfocus.com, has assigned a Bugtraq ID (BID) to this issue for inclusion in the Security Focus vulnerability database.

CVE: This issue is a candidate for inclusion in the CVE list (http://cve.mitre.org), which standardizes names for security problems.